There is a lot of educated guessing in business and in the media about what motivates medical travelers. I call it “educated guessing” because the evidence available is largely anecdotal — there are no broad-based, scientific surveys of medical travelers. There isn’t even a generally agreed upon definition of what a medical tourist *is.* Are you a medical tourist if you live in San Diego, Calif., and take the trolley and a cab to your dentist in Tijuana, Mexico? I’d say yes … but others, in an effort, perhaps, to better define a market for medical services to which insurers and employers can relate, only count those who travel much further, and for medical care, procedures and surgery that might be (or is) insurable.

I bring all this up because it can get very confusing to try to figure out what matters to medical tourists when there are different definitions of what a medical tourist is. A recent McKinsey Quarterly study, Mapping the Market for Medical Travel, says “only 9 percent of the (medical) travelers seek lower costs for medically necessary procedures …”

That statement is taken somewhat out of context from a report that we’ll be talking about more in coming days and weeks. Most people in the United States with knowledge of medical travel agree that cost is a paramount factor in a decision to seek surgery or other medical care overseas. And the McKinsey article acknowledges that “US patients make up 99 percent of the people in this group.”

So … again, what motivates medical travelers depends on what a medical traveler is, and which ones you’re talking to. As a guide to helping potential medical travelers decide what is important to them, BridgeHealth has released a list of ten key value criteria for choosing a medical travel company. A patient’s motivations, reasonably, can be mapped to the list:

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Erik Steele, D.O., a physician in Bangor, Maine is chief medical officer of Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region. He has a terrific article in the Bangor Daily news, headlined, “Consider medical tourism a warning.” in which he discusses the recent news that Hannaford Bros., a supermarket chain with 27,000 employees, is offering a medical travel option as part of employee benefits. The story, initially reported out of Maine, was picked up by the Associated Press and made national news. (Link here.)

Says Dr. Steele:

“Rather than curse Hannaford for its self-interested decision, we would do well to see Hannaford as a corporate canary chirping frantically about the deteriorating conditions brought on by high health care costs in the coal mine of American business. Its action is a warning of things to come. If unheeded, it will not be Hannaford’s action that has brought about the ruin of some hospitals, but the failure of health care and other leaders in this country to listen to the canary.”

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The first BridgeHealth International web seminar on medical travel and tourism, held Friday, was a big success. More than 40 people stopped in, and I know Will Garin and Stephanie Sulger were working overtime to answer the follow-up questions. The company expects to make the so-called “webinars” a regular event.

If you weren’t there (or even if you were) the webinar was an online slide presentation with an hour of commentary by Garin, BridgeHealth’s vice president of marketing, and Sulger, vice president of the consumer division. You can hear the whole show below, though the slides are too large to fit properly in the blog format. If you want to download the whole presentation with the slides, here’s the link to a windows media file:

BridgeHealth Webinar May 30: 73MB, wmv format

Here’s a link to a file that users should be able to download and play on a Mac or IPod:

BridgeHealth Webinar May 30: 26MB, IPod (m4b) format

Here’s an mp4 file that should play nicely in Quicktime, and includes small versions of the slides:

BridgeHealth Webinar May 30: 34MB, QuickTime (mp4) format

And here’s the inline, on-blog audio (MP3 format.) I’m told it may be unlistenable for Mac users, who are best off with the file downloads above.